Caballo Security Box Set

by Camilla Blake

  I dropped the gun on the coffee table and leaned forward, running my fingers through my hair. I’d come home to take Josie to school, but she was already dressed, fed, and packed. She was out the door two minutes after I arrived, rushing to catch a ride with a friend.

  I kept forgetting she was fifteen and had friends who could drive now. I think I blocked it out because the idea scared the living hell out of me!

  I hadn’t meant to sleep very long. I’d just wanted to lie down and close my eyes. But a quick look at my phone showed that more than two hours had passed and I had a long list of text messages from Cheryl and Skylar.

  To save myself time, I called Cheryl.

  “What’s up? What have you found?”

  “Most of the names on the list are cops. We’re cross-referencing them with Mr. Winn’s time of service, and most of them—we haven’t checked them all—their time of service overlaps with Mr. Winn’s time of service. Most of them are retired now.”

  “Were they listed as partners in Caballo at any point?”

  “That’s the thing. Skylar showed me the court papers, but most of these people… the records from that time period are confusing, so I had a friend do a check on the corporation papers for Caballo. He’s telling me that Caballo was never registered as a partnership. Until Ox and Oliver took over, they always filed taxes and whatever else as a sole proprietorship. Now, in the state of Texas, that doesn’t necessarily mean a partnership didn’t exist—which is part of the lawsuit—but it does seem to suggest that the original intention did not include partners.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that there’s something fishy going on here. Skylar has found several documents among Mr. Winn’s documents from the early days of the business that suggest he took money from some of these men, but these documents list the money as investment capital, not a partnership buy-in. And there’s suggestion that the money was always paid back, but we haven’t been able to find proof of that. It seems a chunk of the financial records is missing.”

  I ran my hand over my head again. “I’m confused, Cheryl. Dumb it down for me.”

  “What it means is that this lawsuit seems to have no standing. I don’t know how it’s continued on as long as it has.” She paused a second. “Another interesting fact: the cop who made a statement saying he was an investigator the night of Mr. Winn’s death and lied to protect the family? He’s a member of the lawsuit.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Yeah, I thought that, too. I guess they’ve been undergoing depositions and some things have been coming out about the past. And the lawyers for the plaintiffs, they seem to be the ones pushing the investigation into Ox and his father’s death. They’ve also dug a little through some of Mr. Winn’s cases from when he was a cop. I’m not sure what that’s about, but I have someone taking a look at the same files. And…” She went quiet for a second. “Oh, hey, Brock’s phone just uploaded a recording. I guess someone does use that eavesdropping software I developed.”

  I heard a series of clicks, then voices. Cheryl must have put the phone close to her computer speaker because the voices grew louder. I closed my eyes as I listened, wondering what the hell Brock had been doing getting close enough to these guys to get such a clear recording. Sometimes he forgot how dangerous this job could be and he took chances he shouldn’t. If he got hurt…

  And then I heard it. Lindsay implying that he intended to make sure Ox never made it out of jail.

  “Oh, hell!”

  “Did you hear that?” Cheryl suddenly asked, her enthusiasm loud enough to blow my eardrum. “He just admitted to intention to murder…” Then she stopped, her voice growing sober. “He’s talking about Ox.”

  “Yeah. I guess we owe a huge thanks to Detective Salazar for putting him somewhere safe.”

  “I hope wherever it is, it really is safe.”

  “Me, too.” I sighed. “Listen, I’m coming back into the office. I need to talk to Emilio in accounting and the lawyer Ox was using for the case. I want you to keep on that list of names, get as much information as you can. And put that audio file somewhere safe. That’s going to take that asshole down!”

  I disconnected the call and thanked the investigative gods for Brock’s coup. I grabbed my gun, and the holster I hated wearing that was stashed in a drawer of the sideboard Eva had bought for us. Expensive damn thing, but she was right about the way it added class to the dining room. I paused a moment, feeling a distinct sense of longing as I thought about her. She was in Los Angeles, getting ready for a big media blitz to promote her new movie. I’d told her just a week ago that I couldn’t imagine myself living in such a chaotic place. She’d suggested I could be her permanent bodyguard, and the idea had seemed almost ridiculous then. I’d be like a kept man, providing her whatever services she wanted while she paid my paycheck. But in this moment, it actually seemed like a really sweet deal.

  I left, pulling into a coffee shop a few blocks from my house to grab a little pick-me-up. I was halfway to the office when my phone rang. Assuming it was the lawyer answering my previous call, I answered without glancing at the display on my car’s radio.

  “Akker Mills.”

  “Mr. Mills? This is Addison Gray. I’m a nurse at Southwest General. Your brother, Brock Mills, has been brought into the emergency room.”

  It was almost déjà vu. A little over eight years ago I’d gotten a similar call. Brock and I were estranged at the time, but I was still his emergency contact. It was nice to know he hadn’t changed that.

  “Mr. Mills?”

  “What’s happened?”

  There was hesitation on her end this time. That’s when I knew it was something bad.

  “Where are you located?” I demanded. “What part of town?”

  She spoke an address, one I wasn’t sure I could wrap my mind around. My thoughts just didn’t seem to want to wrap around anything in that moment. But I managed to hold on to the information and punch it into the GPS. I disconnected the call with the nurse—not even sure she’d finished talking—and dialed Skylar.

  “I heard you were on your way back.”

  “There’s… Listen, call Luna Walsh. And my daughter.” I hesitated as I thought of Josie. “No, never mind. Don’t bother Josie just yet. But call Luna. And text Detective Salazar—tell her to get her ass back to the office. Can you do that?”

  “What do I tell Luna?”

  I was quiet for a second, this stupid childhood fear suddenly overwhelming me. I’d once believed that if you said something out loud it would make it come true. I never spoke of monsters under the bed or creatures in the closet, and nothing ever came to steal me away. In this moment, I was afraid that if I said my brother was hurt, it would make it true. If he died… Josie couldn’t take that. Not now, not so soon after her mother’s death.

  “Akker?” Skylar said, concern dripping from her soft voice. “What’s happening? Is Brock okay?”

  “I don’t know. I’m headed to the hospital right now. I’ll let you know.”

  She gasped loudly. I hadn’t said it, yet the cat was out of the bag.

  Please God, please God, please God, please God!

  The emergency room was fairly empty this early in the morning. A few drunks were sleeping it off in the waiting room, a couple of kids surrounding a girl with a bloody towel wrapped around her hand. A man with what looked like an injured leg came in behind me.

  I marched up to the triage desk and banged on the glass window.

  “My brother was brought in this morning.”

  “Sir, please don’t bang on the window.”

  “My brother—Brock Mills—was brought in.”

  “Just a minute, sir.” The woman closed the window and turned to her computer. I knew I shouldn’t, but I smacked my hand so hard against the glass that it vibrated like a drum in its frame. She opened the window again and gave me a dirty look. “Disrespecting the hospital’s property will just cause me to take longer
to look the patient up, sir.”

  “You had better find him right now, lady,” I said, leaning through the opening of the window, “or I’m going to climb through this window and do it myself.”

  “What was the name?” the woman asked, her voice a little shaky.

  “Brock Mills.”

  A blond nurse who happened to have come to stand just inside the room to watch the scene with a couple of other people in scrubs stepped forward. “Mr. Mills?” she asked in a soft voice, like someone might use with a wild animal.

  “Yeah. Are you Addison Green?”

  “Gray.” She strode up to the desk and pressed a button just underneath, releasing a lock on a door a few feet to the right. “Come back. I’ll take you to him.”

  I didn’t have to be told twice. I rushed through the door, part of me expecting it to be locked again by the time I got to it. She was waiting in the corridor the door opened onto. The walls were white and the floor gray, the odor of disinfectant burning my nose. She gestured for me to follow and made her way down the corridor, turning a few corners, passing curtained areas where people waited to be seen for minor injuries and illnesses. We passed through another, shorter corridor, and then she took me to a curtained area where doctors were surrounding a gurney. There were so many people in the room, I couldn’t see who—or what—was on the gurney.

  “He was brought in twenty minutes ago. Paramedics said he was in his car, and his arm fell across the button for the horn, which woke one of our doctors who happened to live just down the street.” The nurse glanced up at me, but all I could see was the flurry of activity in the room. “That’s him, there. He worked the night shift last night and was angry at the noise because he wanted to sleep. But when he got to the car and saw the blood—”

  “Blood?”

  “Your brother was shot, Mr. Mills. It looks like it was a large-caliber weapon, and it was fired through the back of the seat.”

  Someone called for more blood. That was when I finally realized they had been yelling over each other the whole time I’d been standing there, but all my mind had been able to process was the movement. Now I could hear it, the calls for instruments and fluids, orders for medications and tests. I felt a little unsteady, stumbling backward slightly. The nurse rested a hand on my back.

  “Is there someone we can call for you?”

  I shook my head. “Calls are being made.”

  “They’re going to take him up to surgery as soon as he’s stable.”

  I nodded. “He was injured eight years ago. A fire.”

  “Yes, we saw the scars.”

  “He went through hell back then. Don’t make him do it again.”

  She didn’t answer. I didn’t suppose she had to.

  Chapter 11

  Kinsley

  I barely remembered to button my blouse before I ran into the hospital, my heart pounding like it had never done before. It’d taken me too long to get here. I just knew I was going to walk in and find mourners.

  The text had been simple and straight to the point:

  Brock’s been injured. Please come back to office.

  I called Skylar the moment I was in the car, the moment I knew Ox couldn’t overhear me and know that I’d caused to happen exactly what he’d been trying to avoid. If he knew someone had gotten hurt trying to help him, he would never forgive himself. And I was the reason this was happening. I was the reason Brock had been in a position to get hurt.

  Skylar didn’t have any information. All she knew was that Akker had called to ask her to call Brock’s girlfriend. He hadn’t seemed to know what was happening either. But, she told me, she was going to call the hospital next and see what information she could get.

  She never called me back.

  I ran into the emergency room, sliding on the slick soles of my flats. I was about to rush to the triage desk, but Skylar appeared seemingly out of nowhere. She touched my arm and I reacted on instinct. I threw my arms around her narrow shoulders.

  “What’s happening? How is he?”

  A group of people came up behind us, and a man nearly vomited all over my feet. Skylar pulled me to one side, pressing her shoulder against the cool tile wall as she focused on me.

  “He’s upstairs. They’ve got him in surgery.”

  “For what? What happened?”

  Skylar seemed unwilling to tell me for a moment. Her eyes narrowed slightly as she studied me like she was trying to assess me.

  “Were they really going to kill him? Is that why you didn’t take him to the jail?”

  “What?”

  “Ox. We have a recording of Lindsay saying he never intended to allow Ox to be arraigned, let alone released from jail. Is it true? Did you know?”

  “I didn’t know.” I shook my head, feeling suddenly dizzy as I processed this bit of information. He was right? I thought I might be just as sick as the man at the triage window. “I just… I knew Ox wasn’t capable of such a thing. I didn’t… I didn’t think it all through. I just wanted to help him.”

  “Thank you,” Skylar said, tears in her eyes. “If you hadn’t… I don’t know what we’d do…”

  She hugged me again. I let her, for a moment, but this day had been more overwhelming than I was ever going to be able to express. All this touching, all the high emotion, the exhaustion… it was beginning to catch up to me.

  “Tell me,” I said, pulling away as gently as I could, “what’s happened to Brock?”

  “He was shot. They found him in his car, in front of Ox’s house. Prescott thinks that Lindsay and at least one other man broke into the house to search it for something. He thinks Brock got out of the car to try to see what they were up to—that’s how he got the recording. Cheryl put this app on their phones that allows them to listen in on conversations. It automatically records everything it hears and when the user closes the app, it sends it to her computer back at Caballo.”

  “Okay,” I said, not really interested in the technical stuff at this point. “But Brock?”

  “Someone was waiting for him when he got back to his car. Shot him in the back. It went clear through, out his belly.”

  “Oh, God!” I pressed a hand to my mouth. “Is it bad?” I shook my head. “Of course it’s bad!”

  “Akker’s upstairs. I was headed up to check on him when I saw you.”

  “Who do we need to call? Who else should be here?”

  “I already called his girlfriend. She’s in London on business, but she’s already on a plane. That’s the only family Brock has besides Akker and his daughter, but Akker won’t let me call his daughter at school. He wants to wait until there’s word.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know Brock well. He’d been overseas most of the time I’d worked with Caballo, but I knew Akker well enough to know he was a good man. And I knew Ox well enough to know he trusted Brock with his business and his reputation. That was a pretty good endorsement.

  My hands were shaking as I struggled to think this through. “Prescott went to Ox’s house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he take pictures? Does he have a way to get fingerprints?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Have him go back and call the police. He shouldn’t call 911. Give him this number—” I said, typing out a number on my phone and texting it to her. “Have him tell them that he’s been staying with Ox and he discovered… I don’t know, something missing? Or maybe a door unlocked that should have been locked? Whatever. Just have him make sure they see the rooms Lindsay and his crew most likely searched. They won’t do fingerprints, but they should take a few pictures. Maybe we can do something with that later.”

  “I will.”

  “We need to stay as clueless and as efficient as we can to outsiders. It needs to look like we didn’t know about the break-in or why Brock was outside.”

  She nodded again. “Okay.”

  “Oh, and have Cheryl check traffic cams. Maybe we can get something to prove it was Lindsay and his crew in t
he car.”

  “No problem.”

  “I should go see Akker.” I reached up to scratch my cheek and felt a clump of hair hanging down near my jaw. I ran my fingers through it and felt how knotted it all was. I suddenly realized how unprofessional I must look. “I need to clean up first.”

  “Come on. I’ll walk you up and we’ll find a restroom.”

  When I looked at myself in the mirror, I could see the weight of the day in my face. It was only ten in the morning, yet it felt like it was midnight already. I pushed at my hair, recognizing knots that had been put there by Ox’s hand. Under different circumstances, it might have made me blush at the memory. At the moment, though, I found myself hoping it wasn’t the last time he’d have an opportunity to make my hair look like a rat’s nest.

  “How is Ox?” Skylar asked as she stood beside me and washed her hands.

  “He’s holding up.”

  “You know there’s a sort of panic room under the Caballo building, right?”

  I glanced at her as I dug at my hair with my fingers. “I’ve heard.”

  “You could take him there. Maybe then we could convince him to help us out with a little more information.”

  “He suggested the same thing, but the problem is if he’s caught there, not only will he get in trouble for trying to evade arrest, but everyone in the building—especially those on the top floor—could be arrested for abetting a criminal. It’s not worth the risk, especially when we’re working under a time constraint.”

  Skylar studied her hands for a moment. “You sound a little like him.”

  “Do I?”

  “Always so practical.” Skylar dried her hands, then dug in her handbag, producing a comb. “Here. This might make things easier.”

  I took it gratefully and roughly combed the knots out of my hair. My clothes were wrinkled and askew, the latter easily fixed, but the former impossible to do anything about. As I tucked my blouse back into my skirt, I realized that I’d rushed out of that despicable place without my underwear. I cursed softly, but there was nothing I could do about it now.